Over 1,000 filmmakers sign petition supporting Abraham and Szor

Ran Boker’s Ynet report says more than 1,000 filmmakers signed a petition supporting Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor after the uproar over NAZA. The names Ynet prints include Liran Atzmor, described as an initiator, Nadav Lapid, Orna Ben Dor, Netalie Braun, Rani Blair, Hagai Levi, Shai Carmeli-Pollak and Shlomi Elkabetz. The text, as Ynet quotes it, asks people who still care about freedom of expression and artistic freedom to stand with the directors. It says the past days have brought a campaign of vilification and incitement “drawing ever closer to effectively sanctioning violence and posing a physical threat to their lives.” That sentence is the petition’s, not a finding this desk adds.

They criticise people who attacked the film without seeing it, say they had expected that from the culture minister, and say colleagues joining in lends support to Miki Zohar’s threat to revoke citizenship. They add that they have not seen the film either. Their request is distribution in Israel, so a real argument about the war can happen. They say that argument has barely taken place in Israeli media. Abraham had told Variety, on premiere day, that he and Szor would try to show the film there. The petition repeats that request at industry scale.

Ynet’s own description of the film is more specific about a unit than the Venice reviews are. It says the rooftop interviews present 24 male and female soldiers from Unit 8200, speaking about collateral-damage policy, bombardments and targeted killings, and about artificial intelligence recommending whom to kill from phone surveillance, including, according to the interviewees, when that meant killing family members. Variety, the Biennale listing and the Guardian’s citizenship report describe military and intelligence personnel and do not, in those pieces, name Unit 8200. This page leaves the unit where Ynet put it. Ynet also says the director refused to disclose what evidence supports the claims, and that the IDF chief of staff and the IDF spokesperson denied the allegations.

The letter sits next to, and is not the same document as, the press-freedom statements already indexed on this site. It is a filmmakers’ petition, with named directors, a demand that the film be seen in Israel, and an explicit worry about physical harm. Threats, ministerial language and the Channel 13 interview in which Abraham said he feared he might not return are separate entries on https://nazafilm.org/record/timeline. Public defenders are listed from https://nazafilm.org/record/defenders. This desk does not invent an Israeli cinema date the petition does not give. Confirmed public screenings are at https://nazafilm.org/showings, and where to watch is at https://nazafilm.org/watch.